Swim Back to Me Page 11

  Kathryn sat. The heaviness sank through her: traveling her bloodstream, outlining her bones. Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief. The shifts could still catch her by surprise.

  Something orange flashed through the backyard, and she looked up in time to see a tabby cat alight on the fence and then dive into the neighbor’s yard. Next she became aware of Lainie moving around in her bedroom. There were footsteps across the upstairs hallway, and the shower came on with a sudden burst. On the other side of the bathroom was Ben’s room. Just two more hours and she could go back up. She glanced at the clock: less than two hours. The few other times both Dave and Lainie had been out in the evening she’d sat in there with Ben’s windows open—his windows open, his lights off, the night mixing with the music until the combination all but carried her away. Coming back downstairs afterward she’d felt a dark, empty exaltation.

  In a few minutes the front door opened again, and Dave appeared in the kitchen with a cautious, measuring expression on his face. He ducked his head a bit, then looked back up at her. “Hi.”

  She swallowed. “Hi.”

  There was no reason not to get up and go kiss him, no reason for him not to come over and kiss her, but neither of them moved. Whenever they kissed now she felt that they were kissing either because of Ben or despite him.

  Dave set his briefcase down and stretched, then glanced over at the sink. Don’t bother, she wanted to say, there’s nothing there: no pile of washed vegetables, no Styrofoam tray of meat.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  “Not really,” she replied, although all at once she was, a curved, off-center hunger deep in her stomach.

  “Lainie?”

  “Taking a shower.”

  “I could go get Indian.”

  She nodded.

  “Or Chinese. Will you eat if I get something?”

  She nodded again.

  He sighed, his face tired around the eyes, grayish. He looked rumpled, in an unironed plaid shirt and khakis that suddenly appeared too short, bits of his dark socks visible between hem and shoe. “My engine’s smoking again,” he said. “I’ve got to take it in tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” She tried again: “Too bad.”

  “What’d you do today?” Before she could answer, he went to the cracker cabinet and fished in a box of butter thins. She figured he was afraid of her reply—afraid she’d say, as she usually did, Nothing. In fact, she’d even left the house for a little while, for the first time in days. Then spent seven hours listening to music.

  “Errands,” she said. “I picked up your gray suit for you.”

  “Oh,” he said, brightening a little. “Thanks.”

  Lainie’s door opened with a slight creak, and a moment later her footsteps sounded on the stairs, bam, bam, bam, until the final few steps, which she took in one leap, ending with a great thud.

  “Hey, Pop.” She came into the kitchen with long strides, her hair wet on her shoulders as Kathryn expected, but wearing her new crocheted black sweater over a short burgundy dress.

  “What’s this?” Dave said. “You look like a movie star, what’s the story?”

  “Dad,” she said, giving him a look. She hated being complimented, had since early childhood, when she was always telling Kathryn and Dave not to make too big a deal when she did something well—rode her bike without training wheels, added numbers in her head.

  Kathryn looked more closely. Lainie’s cheeks were flushed, and her lips—was she wearing lipstick? A pale matte shade obviously chosen to look like no lipstick at all.

  “I told you,” Lainie said. “I have that study group tonight.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dave said, nodding. “I’d forgotten.”

  Kathryn drummed her fingers on the table. “You’d better call for that Indian so neither of you’ll be late.”

  Dave scratched the side of his neck. “Indian food OK with you, Laine?” He opened a drawer and riffled through the assortment of takeout menus inside, finally pulling out a light green one. “I guess I’ll skip it tonight,” he said over his shoulder to Kathryn.

  Her heart pounded. “Your meeting?”

  “I’d forgotten Lainie needed a car.”

  “She can take mine, you can take yours.” He gave her an irritated look. “I told you, the engine’s smoking.”

  Her mouth went dry. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be. She’d even figured out what she was going to play first: X, this loud, off-tone band with a screechy female vocalist. Your phone’s off the hook … but you’re not! “That’s ridiculous,” she said as evenly as she could. “You drove home with it smoking, you’re going to have to drive it to the shop …”

  “It’s thirty minutes on the freeway. I don’t feel like standing on the side of the road waiting for Triple A if it dies.”

  “Well, then you should take the Trooper and Lainie can get a ride.”

  Across the kitchen, Lainie opened her mouth and closed it again. “I told Allison I could drive,” she said in a small, shaky voice. “I already know, she can’t get a car tonight.”

  “It’s fine,” Dave said. “You can take the Trooper as planned.” He faced Kathryn. “I don’t mind missing it this week. It’s no big deal.”

  Kathryn struggled to maintain her expression, but it was too late: a series of questions was forming on his face. Why did she want him to go? Why did she prefer to have him gone? Why beyond the fact that it was now impossible for her to be with anyone?

  She didn’t want him to know—ever. I’ve been listening to Ben’s music. Constantly. And nobody gets to ask me about it! “Well,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense, that’s all.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not going to keep going forever, you know.”

  She looked away, a feeling of desperation coming over her. Of course he wasn’t, but it had barely been six months, he couldn’t be ready to stop yet. As much as she didn’t want to go, she wanted him to. Why? “It makes me feel better,” he’d said early on. And she wanted him to feel better. And she wanted herself not to.

  She’d gone once. Had let him drive her to the place, the room where even the arrangement of chairs was respectful and solicitous, not too close but not too far apart. She chose one with glossy wood arms, but then she looked around at the other bereaved parents, and the meeting started, and she couldn’t do it. She felt molten. She didn’t want friends, compassionate or otherwise. She wanted to scream in a padded room, scratch her arms until they bled.

  “So?” Lainie said. “Are we having dinner? Because I could pick up food somewhere on my way.”

  Dave looked at Kathryn, his deep-blue eyes bloodshot with fatigue and grief and worry. And impatience: that, too. He hesitated for a moment and then reached for the phone. “No, no,” he said. “We’re having dinner.”

  After Lainie left, the evening inched along glacially. Dave was in the kitchen while Kathryn was in the bedroom. Then Dave was in the TV room while Kathryn was in the living room. That’s how it was now. After a while she picked up her library book, a novel about a woman falling in love with a minister in contemporary rural England. As if she cared. As if she gave a fuck. What a word, what a good word—what an essential word, and how surprising. She used to try to shame Ben out of using it. Not by saying it was bad or dirty—God no, she had subtler tactics than that—but by trying to appeal to his sense of pride. It’s clichéd, she told him. But—and here she took some belated pleasure in his willfulness, or his indifference, whatever it was—he didn’t give a fuck about that.

  All evening his stereo called to her. His room called. At one point she got up and went to the bottom of the stairs and just stood there, looking up into the shadows. Dave appeared at the other end of the hallway and they stared at each other for a long moment. Then she turned and walked away.

  In the morning she could hardly wait for them to leave. Lainie’s spokes finally twitched through the side yard, but Dave hemmed and hawed about his smoking engine and how the garage guy would take h
im to work but he might need her to pick him up. Whatever, she wanted to say. Whatever.

  Finally, up the stairs to Ben’s room. Each morning she entered it with the guilty conscience of a snooper. Each day she had to reclaim it. She wondered about this. Could you snoop on someone who’d died?

  Died. It sounded so peaceful. Ben had been killed. Huge, straining train engines haunted her dreams now: movie trains hurtling through tunnels, steam engines puffing around ominous bends. Ironic, because the train that had killed him was your basic commuter, a five-car double-decker shuttling back and forth between San Francisco and San Jose. It was an irony perhaps only Ben would have appreciated, with his finely honed sense of the ironic. “It’s an ironic beanbag chair,” he’d said when he dragged the bright orange vinyl thing in from a garage sale. “It goes with my ironic studiousness.” Which was a reference to something she’d said, a little too naggingly, a few weeks earlier: that she felt like he studied from a distance—that he didn’t so much study as watch himself study. At which point he’d given her an ironic smile and put on his headphones.

  She did what she always did to start. Crossed to his dresser and opened his drawers. Socks and underwear, shirts, shorts. Sweatshirts at the bottom. She could no longer bear to smell them, but she patted the bulky shapes, old blues, grays, greens. “This girl said I look good in dark green,” he’d said once, and she’d smoothed his shoulders and smiled, thinking he always had, since he was a baby.

  Back across the room to the closet. She slid open the door, knelt in front of his worn old backpack, and unzipped the front pocket. There was the envelope. Some mornings it was enough just to see it there, but today she took it out and opened it, a security envelope with a scratchy black pattern on the inside. It contained the article from the Chronicle, folded awkwardly to accommodate the uneven lengths of the columns.

  Her friend Susan had suggested a scrapbook. “It would be a place you could keep the article, and the note from the little boy’s family, and some recent photographs …” Kathryn had demurred politely, but she’d been incensed. Like she’d want bookends for his life, his baby book on one end of a short shelf and a book about his death on the other. Ha.

  She pulled the article out, still soft and smudgy, not yet passed into the brittle yellow stage that was the destination of all newsprint. Unfolding it, she didn’t read the words so much as take in the shapes of the paragraphs. She had it memorized. Just as she had the note memorized.

  Her chest tightened. She hated to think of the note. The loopy handwriting, the little bouquet of flowers on the return address label. She hated to think of it but she wanted to think of it. Sometimes she felt she needed to think of it.

  Dear David and Kathryn and Lainie: We are so sorry for your loss. Ben must have been a wonderful son and brother. The death of a family member is always hard. What happened Tuesday fills our hearts with grief. No one but a hero would have done what Ben did. We know that he gave up his life so our Tyler could live. When he is old enough we will tell Tyler that he owes his life to a hero.

  The nerve. That was all Kathryn could think: the nerve. Because to hell with how it was heartfelt and all that crap—where was We know that our negligence caused this? Where was We will blame ourselves forever? Nowhere, that’s where. Nowhere. And The death of a family member is always hard? What happened fills our hearts with grief? It was too bad they were so sad! The thing that got Kathryn most, though, was We know that he gave up his life so our Tyler could live. As if he’d made a conscious choice! Me or this little kid? OK, the kid. It was enraging: they seemed to expect her to be proud of him—to share their admiration of what he’d done.

  Well, she wasn’t. She didn’t.

  They’d actually gone so far as to enclose a photograph of little Tyler, a mottled-background shot from Sears, with the kid looking wet-lipped into the middle distance, a tiny toolbelt strapped around his waist. Dave had agreed that there was no reason to save the note, and after a few weeks Kathryn had thrown it away. He didn’t even know about the photograph. It hadn’t been in the house an hour before Kathryn had put it into a metal bucket and thrown a lit match in after. A lovely gesture.

  She looked down at the article again. “Youth Saves Child, Loses Life.” Some days the headline had an almost poetic power over her, but today she just felt sour. Youth—it made him sound like an Eagle Scout. And loses life? He hadn’t misplaced it. Where is my life? Shit, it must be around here somewhere!

  Where is my mind? Where is my mind? That was from a song, but which one?

  She put the article back in the envelope, the envelope back in the backpack. The closet was crammed with his stuff—papers, old clothes, his one blazer flattened between ski jackets. Mom, I look like an idiot!

  She closed the closet door and went to the stereo. There were hundreds of records, lined up in milk crates. Shelves and shelves of CDs and tapes. He’d spent a fortune, driving up to San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland. Record stores sometimes called and left messages for him—Tell him we just got a used copy of blah blah if he’s still interested. Kathryn would tell him—then overhear him sheepishly asking Lainie if he could borrow twenty bucks, his own wallet long since empty.

  What to play? She didn’t know what she felt like today. Actually, she did: everything. She began pulling out CDs until she had twenty-five or thirty in a pile on the floor. She pinched open the cases and put the discs into the carousel, which had slots for something like a hundred CDs. In theory, that meant she could listen to music nonstop for about four days. If only.

  She pressed Random and sat in the beanbag chair.

  Hips like Cinderella. She adored this song! The voice was insinuating, lascivious, close to a whisper. Must be having a good shame. That whispering voice and the bass and drums, full of tension. Talking sweet about nothing. Getting ready for: Cookie, I think you’re TAME! And the guy screamed it, and the guitar rushed in, and Kathryn’s head knocked around so much she could have ended up with whiplash.

  Sometimes her neck ached afterward, downstairs.

  Ben twitched his foot. She used to pass his room and he’d have the headphones on and be twitching his foot like a madman, and in her mind she’d be like, Go running! Let off some steam! What a fool. Listening was letting off steam. Listening was like sex and eating and screaming, all at once. It was so physical. Looking at a painting, reading a book—you could forget you had a body. Rock and roll existed to remind you of your body. It existed to make your body into an instrument, to play you.

  Fall on your face in those bad shoes.

  The headphones thing destroyed her. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d asked him to wear them, saying something asinine like “It won’t matter to you and it will matter to me.” Aargh. She’d tried them and it mattered—God, did it matter. Listening through headphones was like talking on the phone long distance to someone you were dying to see. To touch. All that nagging was just one of the things she’d like to kill herself for.

  Dave would sigh and turn away if she said that to him. That she’d like to kill herself. He’d sigh and turn away if she said it, and she’d say it so he’d sigh and turn away.

  The song ended. What would be next, what next? Random always gave her a nervous feeling, her heartbeat up in her throat. Aching anticipation.

  The morning sun moved slowly across Ben’s room, and she followed it, ending up sometime after noon on the floor by the closet, her lower body flooded with light while her face and shoulders grew cold. The songs washed over her, jazzed her, ignited her, and put her out in the space of three or four minutes. She was hungry but she waited and it went away. Thirsty—that usually lasted. Whatever. It didn’t work to bring stuff to eat or drink in with her. She zoned out, and for a while she didn’t even really hear the change from one song to the next. Peace.

  A song ended and the next began, and she sat up. A ringing, shiny like bells—she absolutely loved the guitar on this. She’d gone through a phase of listening to this band over and ove
r, one album after another. I fell in love with a hooker, she laughed in my face. So seriously I took her, I was a disgrace. I was out of line; I was out of place, out of time to save face. See the open mouth of my suitcase, saying leave this place. Leave without a trace. Here was her favorite part, the guitar winding. Leave without a trace. And winding tighter, cinching a string around her heart: she actually saw this white kitchen string around a fist of muscle, blood turning the white to red, and it didn’t disgust her at all, it just—went with the song. Leave. Without. A trace. And there was a dazzling burst of chords, and God, it was sublime, sublime and ordinary, sublime because ordinary—it was rock and roll. She imagined Ben in here, damned headphones on, listening to this—its antic energy, the questioning defiance of its lyrics. I tried to get a good job, with honest pay. Might as well join the mob, the benefits are OK. What was it like to be seventeen, eighteen, and to hear that? Last fall, maybe a week or two before the accident, Ben had joked that he’d go to college next year unless he got a better offer. “It’s usually after you’ve gone to college that you get the better offers,” Dave said, and the two of them laughed the thin-lipped Stephenson laugh.

  Ben was a Stephenson, no question. Kathryn’s strain of high-cheekboned Slavic seriousness barely registered in either kid. Summers in North Dakota, visiting Dave’s parents on their farm, Ben fit right in. Tall, rangy. He looked good with a piece of straw poking out of his mouth. He looked good: then he opened his mouth and the illusion pretty much fell apart. “Oh, no!” he cried. “I forgot to worry about nasty microorganisms,” and he made a big show of spitting the straw to the ground. Dave’s father gave him a slightly irritated glance as he passed by in his work pants, off to fix the tractor.

  Still, Ben was good-natured on those visits. “Bologna salad sandwiches for lunch?” he’d cry. “Yay, Grandma.” He even made one at home once: chopped bologna and relish mixed together in a bowl and spread on white bread. Kathryn walked into the kitchen and couldn’t believe her eyes. “I’m cultivating my roots,” he said. “Also a slight stomachache.”